by Mark Dapin
He saluted an invisible general.
‘Sometimes I hear blokes talking about the Holocaust,’ said Jimmy. ‘They say, “How could the Jews have just marched to their deaths like that? Why didn’t they put up a fight?” The Jews were tailors and peasants. What could they fight with? Hatpins and pitchforks? How could they organise? We were in regiments. We had guns and we had training. How could we have marched to our deaths? That’s what I want to know. Why the hell did we do that?
‘Even the Japs didn’t expect it. They’d come to fight too. They’d come to die. When we surrendered, it was like we’d cheated death, and you can’t do that. You can’t stand up in a war and say, “I’m not going to be killed!”
‘War’s not a boxing match. You don’t go twelve rounds trying to knock the other man out, then hug each other and walk away. You haven’t broken a bloke’s nose when you’ve shot him, you’ve pissed on his life. You’ve made his wife a widow. You’ve put a hole in his mother’s heart. It’s not Marquess of Queensberry. It’s not a boys’ game. Can you see that, David?’
Jimmy took me by the shoulders, but when I stiffened he relaxed his grip.
‘I met up with Bathurst Billy outside the Raffles Hotel,’ he said. ‘It was the closest we ever came to being inside the place. There were twisted cars and shattered trucks and bits of bodies in the bomb craters in the road, and a fog of burning fuel in the air. We had to step through the tangle of telephone wires that had fallen when the telegraph poles came down.’
Jimmy coughed, as if he were still breathing clouds of fire. It started as a rasp, but grew into a growl. It shook his shoulders and forced his eyes closed. He grabbed his chest, leaned away from the pavement and spluttered into the road a black blob flecked with blood.
‘We were filthy and exhausted,’ he said. ‘We’d been fighting for seventy days. We weren’t frightened, exactly, because frightened people need something to be scared of, and we just didn’t know what to expect. But I’d seen Jap blood run like soup. I’d seen men take souvenirs from their bodies. I don’t just mean watches and rings, I mean ears and noses. I mean fingers and cocks. We didn’t think of them as human, see. They wore boots with split toes, cloven hooves, as if they were kosher. That was the joke: they had cow’s feet but, eighteen months later, we were the ones eating grass. We’d thought they were little buck-teethed devils who couldn’t fight or fuck, but they fucked us up good and proper. I can promise you that.
‘We marched from the city to Selarang Barracks in Changi, with our watches strapped to our ankles so the Japs wouldn’t loot them, past Malays and Indians waving Japanese flags, and coolies perched on their rickshaw shafts, spitting betel juice. Every few hundred yards a Chinese would give us a smile or v-sign or a cup of water, but it still felt the way the Japanese wanted it to feel: like the people we’d been sent over to protect were celebrating that we’d failed.
‘Normally our blokes would’ve been able to finish a march like that with no bloody worries. It wasn’t as tough as the exercises we’d done in Tamworth, stomping from the showground to the lookout and back, but we were tired and that made us weaker, and it was hot as buggery and that made us weaker, and were beaten and that made us weaker.
‘Also, most of the men had taken everything they could carry, because we knew there wasn’t going to be anything waiting for us at the other end. Some of the old soldiers, the retreads, were humping enough tucker to last a month. Other blokes were hanging on to stuff that was about as useful as pants on a dog. One fella was carrying two bicycle wheels, another tried to get into camp with a great big bloody floor lamp. God knows why he thought he might need that.
‘The best of them stuffed their packs with books and records. Without them, the next years would’ve been impossible. You can’t survive without art. I didn’t know that before. It’s something I learned. You need stories to keep you going. You need pictures of another world. You need music.’
Jimmy coughed.
‘But what you don’t bloody need is bagpipes. We’d been marching about two hours when some kilted bloody jock started blowing into his ball bag and making every bloody minute ten times worse.
‘The straps of our bags cut into our shoulders, and blokes started throwing away bits of kit and clothes they couldn’t carry. The boongs scooped them up and ran off. One or two fellas even abandoned their tucker, but others grabbed it and it all got shared out in the end, so I suppose it didn’t matter much. A few blokes collapsed and had to be carried the last miles. That was something we had to get used to. That was what we should’ve trained for at Tamworth.
‘I had two dozen tins of bully beef on my back, because you never know when you might next get a good feed – although in a million years I wouldn’t’ve thought it would be in 1945. We heard the war was going to last another six months at most. We heard it from the same blokes who told us the Japs were dead set to attack from the sea.’
Jimmy nodded to himself.
‘They also told us the Japs wouldn’t accept surrender, because they didn’t surrender themselves, so there we were in a situation that couldn’t possibly bloody happen. We’d been flogged by a bunch of half-blind midgets who couldn’t fight, and bombed silly by bastards who couldn’t fly, and now we were prisoners of a race who didn’t take prisoners. Up close, the Japs weren’t even bloody yellow. They were more brown, like the boongs.
‘At the end of the march, we were in Changi. Actually, we weren’t in bloody Changi. We were in Selarang, a British Army barracks near Changi Jail. Changi was built by the Brits to lock up short-arse commos like Chinese Frank. Not many soldiers ever saw the inside of Changi Jail, but every man and his dog says they were there. I don’t know why.’
We had reached the beach. The wind rattled the flags on the pavilion as Jimmy made a path through rollerbladers to lean his elbows on the rails overlooking the ocean. A salty gust blew in from the sea, and he pushed his cap further down onto his head.
‘Frida wants me to go and see Arielberger,’ said Jimmy. ‘Arielberger is twenty-eight years old. What the hell can he understand? My generation killed other men. And died. And expected to die in return. Our minds work differently to yours. When we came home from the war, we went back into ordinary jobs. So you’d know, when you went to see your bank manager, that he might have bayoneted a man to death. He’s talking to you about your bloody mortgage but he’s seeing his little mate lying on the ground with his legs on the other side of the road. The bus driver could have driven a tank over women’s bodies cut to pieces; that might be what’s going on in his head when he rolls into bed with his wife. He might’ve learned to drive in the army – you can tell because they don’t use their bloody gears.
‘Nowadays,’ said Jimmy, ‘death is only for old people, for returned men. It’s not the same for you. You take life for granted.’ I felt sorry that I hadn’t been in a war, but they didn’t seem to have big ones, where everybody joined in, any more.
‘I had a Chinese girl in Singapore,’ said Jimmy suddenly.
The wind stung his eyes. He rubbed them dry.
‘We smoked Wills cigarettes and watched the sun fall into the straits,’ he said.
He drew his hand over his eyes.
‘Her skin smelled of sandalwood.’ He filled his lungs with sea air. ‘Her name was Mei-Li. She had black hair and she brushed it while we sat on my army blanket and watched Chinese fishermen haul in their nets.’
There were Asians taking pictures of each other on Bondi Beach.
‘I went back to the rickshaw men’s house with Chinese Frank,’ said Jimmy. ‘I bought them a bottle of Chinese wine and they passed around the pipe. When the men were asleep Mei-Li took my hand.’
Jimmy bent towards the ocean. I noticed other old men, spaced out along the rail, dressed in light suits and sandshoes, searching for their memories in the ocean.
‘A lot of the blokes had local women they called girlfriends,’ said Jimmy, ‘but they paid for them, they coughed up the fare. I could nev
er do that. I couldn’t want somebody who didn’t want me. I was a romantic, David. For me, it had to be love. Even with a Chinese girl – and, for most blokes, that was like falling in love with a toilet. They were just some place you stuck your shlong.
‘And she hardly even spoke English, although she understood more than Chinese Frank made out. Mei-Li was my first. Everything before her had been fumblings outside a dance. She was real – the only real thing about my phoney war. Maybe in my memory I’ve turned her into something she wasn’t, but I don’t think so. I was broken-hearted with pity for her – she’d lost everyone to the Japs, she’d seen her family die – and pity’s the biggest part of love, David. Everything else is just somewhere to put your shlong.
‘You know something,’ said Jimmy, ‘those were the best days of my life, sitting out under the stars with Mei-Li. She was small even for a Chinese girl. I felt like I was twice her size.’
The Asians on the beach were trying to set up illusions for their cameras, so it looked as though they were surfing in the sea while they were standing in the sand.
‘I needed someone to save, David,’ said Jimmy. ‘A man always needs a woman to save. I was going to protect Mei-Li from the commos and the fascists, from the war, from the whole bloody world.
‘She was beautiful in the Chinese way, with eyes that were nearly as black as her hair. Sometimes I’ve wondered if any woman would’ve meant the same as Mei-Li, but then I remember the way I felt back then, the hatred for the people who’d hurt her. Maybe it was the hate that was important, not the love.’
Jimmy began to walk again, past dry showerheads hanging like lampposts, to the quieter end of the beach. Behind us, men wrapped in towels struggled with their wetsuits in the open jaws of station wagons while we watched surfers in the sunshine roll with the waves.
‘Best bloody country in the world,’ said Jimmy.
‘Can I have an ice cream?’ I asked.
‘It was my first time with a woman,’ Jimmy replied. ‘When I was with Mei-Li I didn’t want to die. But it didn’t change anything for her.’
I’d had enough of the soppy stuff.
‘What’s it like to fire a gun?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Did you ever get shot?’
‘Shot? No.’
‘Did you use your bayonet?’
‘I used it to open tins.’
‘And stab Japs in the guts?’
‘No.’
‘So what are your medals for?’ I asked.
‘For turning up, I suppose,’ he said. ‘They sent them to me in the mail. I didn’t ask for them.’
‘You don’t ask for medals,’ I told him. ‘You’re awarded them. For heroism.’
‘I had a Chinese girl in Singapore,’ said Jimmy. ‘Her name was Mei-Li.’
This was very disappointing. It seemed Jimmy had spent most of the war surrendering, in prison, or thinking about his girlfriend. No wonder he didn’t like to talk about it.
‘I’ve never told anyone about Mei-Li,’ said Jimmy. ‘Even Frida doesn’t know.’
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I promised.
It would be an easy secret to keep, because it was rubbish: fifty years ago, my grandad liked a Chinese girl with a hairbrush.
We caught the bus home. Jimmy watched the pavement from the window.
Grandma had dinner ready for us – steak and potatoes with fried onions and mushrooms.
‘Did you have a nice time?’ she asked me as we sat down. ‘Did he keep you entertained?’
Jimmy cut into his meat.
‘Great steak, love,’ he said.
‘Is it?’ she asked.
‘Of course it is,’ he said.
‘The reason I wondered if David was enjoying himself,’ said Grandma, ‘is because I didn’t think he had come to stay with us to hear stories about your Chinese whore.’
BONDI
FRIDAY 27 APRIL 1990
I told Mum I had forgotten to go to school, and she screamed down the phone that I’d end up a moron like my father. Dad used to say he’d earned his degree from the university of life, but he didn’t seem to remember a lot about the lessons, and he sometimes asked questions like, ‘Do they still have geography?’
I came to breakfast in my school shirt and pants, with my books in my Billabong bag. Jimmy sat at the table with his drawings, a hammer and a tin of nails. He looked disappointed.
‘I thought we’d fix up the spirit house today,’ he said.
‘You knocked it down twenty years ago,’ said Grandma.
‘That was the outhouse,’ said Jimmy.
‘Well, God knows there’s enough work for you both to do in this house,’ said Grandma. ‘So what are you going to fix?’
‘Everything,’ he said. Grandma squinted at him.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘where are you going to start? The windows. We’ve got to get the windows done before winter.’
‘We will,’ promised Jimmy.
Grandma unplugged the television cabinet and wheeled it across the room.
‘It’ll make it easier for you to get at the front window,’ she said.
‘I’m not doing that today,’ said Jimmy. ‘I haven’t got the tools.’
‘So what’re you doing today?’ asked Grandma. ‘The floorboards? You can’t tell me you haven’t got a hammer and nails, because I can see them on the table where I’ve told you not to put your tools.’
‘They need replacing,’ said Jimmy, ‘the floorboards.’
‘I know they bloody do,’ said Frida.
‘Banging in a nail would just split the timber,’ he said.
‘Walking on them splits the timber,’ said Grandma.
‘You need a floor layer,’ said Jimmy.
‘You’ve laid on enough floors in your life,’ said Grandma. ‘You and your shikker mates.’
‘I can’t fix the floorboards, love,’ said Jimmy. ‘Not with my back.’
‘So what can you do?’ asked Grandma. ‘You’re not going to paint the kitchen with a hammer.’
‘I’m going to build a spirit house,’ said Jimmy, ‘so the ghosts move in there and leave us alone.’
Grandma looked at him with kindly old eyes, snatched the hammer out of his hand and swung it at his head. He ducked and it missed, but it almost clipped his ear.
‘I’ll bloody kill you!’ Grandma shouted, and tried to punch him on the nose.
Jimmy weaved in his seat, but she caught him and boxed his ears. Jimmy yelped. I’d never heard a person yelp before.
Grandma rubbed his ears into his skull, to make them sting.
‘You useless old bastard,’ she cried, and stormed into their bedroom.
Jimmy rested his elbow against the doorjamb as Grandma threw her corsets, stockings and scarves into a suitcase with her cardigans, frocks and blouses. The doorframe shifted slightly and came away from the wall.
‘Everything in my house is broken,’ shouted Grandma, ‘and you want to build a house for spirits! You’re a menace to society, digging bloody holes and hiding biscuits and chasing ghosts! You’re a bloody meshuganneh! You’re as mad as cut steak! You’re shell-shocked! You need a hole drilled in your bloody head! I’m going to stay with Mrs Ethelberger! I’m going to have you bloody sectioned!’
She pulled a bundle of money from her bedside drawer.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said, ‘and I’m taking the shortbreads.’ Every time Jimmy went to put his arm around her she pushed him away, and finally she kicked him in the shins. She was sick of everything, she thought Jimmy would pay her more attention if she were dead, and she kept on shouting at him while she rang a taxi.
‘Silver Street, please,’ she said, ‘you senile old fool,’ and the operator put the phone down.
Jimmy started promising things but Grandma put her hands over her ears, pushed aside the bead curtain, dragged her suitcase into the street and stamped off to catch a cab on Bondi Road.
&
nbsp; Like everyone else, Grandma had forgotten she was supposed to be looking after me.
Jimmy scratched his chin as he watched her leave. He touched the peak of his cap and rolled a cigarette. I wasn’t sure if he knew I was there.
I asked if I really had to go to school. It wasn’t a proper week, with Anzac Day on the Wednesday, and we never did much on Fridays. The teachers would only want to know where I’d been yesterday, and I didn’t have a note from my mum. I said I thought I could learn more by talking to Jimmy.
He looked at me vaguely, as if he could not quite think who I was.
‘You can stay,’ he said, ‘if you help with the drawings.’
Jimmy planned out a structure of beams for the roof, and told me to sketch the altar and urn, but he didn’t give me any paper.
‘They say Changi was a holiday camp,’ he said as he cross-hatched lines in his sketchpad, ‘but it wasn’t, it was an army camp. We were divided into “officers” and “men”. What were the officers supposed to be, if they weren’t men? And some of them weren’t, either, because they had no bloody balls.
‘Changi could’ve been anything,’ he said. ‘It could’ve been a university or a village or a soviet. It could’ve been an asylum. But the only thing the officers knew was army bull and King’s Regulations and drill and parades. Bloody drill and parades. For some of the boys it was the way they spent their last days on earth, and that was fine by old Jack Callaghan, because at least they died as soldiers.’
Jimmy stroked his cheekbone with his thumb.
‘We had CO’s parades, kit inspections and fatigues. It was like we had been captured by our own army, like we’d breached regulations by surrendering and we’d all been thrown in the boob.
‘But you met all kinds of fellas. There was one boy from Bendigo who walked everywhere on his hands. I don’t know what that was about. Another kept hold of his ukulele all through the war. Or maybe he kept building new ones. I don’t know.